The Leading Indicators

by Gregg Easterbrook

  “The girls’ room is lovely,” Lillian said. She had come over to assist in the latter phase of moving in—hanging pictures on walls, setting out tchotchkes.

  “There was a fight about giving up their own rooms,” Margo said, slightly weary. “A fight about who got which bed. A fight about sharing a computer instead of one for each of them. A fight about—well, I could save time by telling you what there wasn’t a fight about.”

  “They’ll get used to the new situation.”

  “Tell them in twenty years when they will listen.”

  Lillian said, “How I wish I’d had a sister to share my room with.”

  Often children are told that bad things—divorces, sudden moves, sports defeats, embarrassments around friends—are happening for their own good. “It’s a blessing in disguise,” among the hackneyed comments in the human phrase book, is like saying, “This tornado is a sunny day in disguise.” Margo had always disliked “It’s a blessing in disguise” and all variants, such as “God works in mysterious ways,” a phrase often heard in sermons but not encountered in scripture.

  In scripture, God is not mysterious, except as regards origin: there are specific, clearly enunciated divine ends, coupled to God’s frustration in achieving them. To Margo, most of life’s frustrations and wrong turns were bad luck or just really sucked—she was more comfortable telling the girls “This really sucks” than announcing a blessing in disguise. But she failed in being honest with them about the move, though knew she should have been. Nothing mysterious there.

  At least, Margo could tell herself, she never used the alibi “Everything happens for a reason.” People said to each other “Everything happens for a reason” in order to palliate grief. But if everything happens for a reason, the world is in even worse shape than feared.

  The procession of delivery trucks did not arrive at the townhouse, as had been the case at their home. But there was a plastic package on the table, ripped by a zipper line, with a pair of inexpensive casual pants for Tom—the kind that someone on the sales floor of a hardware store would wear. “Had to exchange the last one, he needs a larger waistline,” Margo said. “Most places are so good now about returns. Tom has this theory that he should only own two pairs of slacks, both from Bean’s or Lands’ End. Each time one wears out, he would send it back, insisting on a replacement, and wear the other till the new one came. Never have to pay for slacks again.”

  Lillian remembered something she’d been told at a party, information that, at the time, seemed fantastical to her, given her naïveté about shopping culture: “I’ve heard of women who purchase stunning jewelry from Tiffany or thousand-dollar party dresses, wear them to an event where everyone goes ooh and ahh, then the next day return them for a refund, claiming dissatisfaction.”

  Margo said, “Really!” She left out that she had done this. Though the claim of dissatisfaction was easy enough to believe.

  “I was watching cable news,” Lillian said. “Today’s scandal is the governor having affairs. With persons of the opposite gender. At least there’s a refreshing change of pace.”

  “How does anyone have time for affairs?” Margo asked. In her twenties, she wanted romance to fill her every available hour. Now she had no available hours. “My day is broken down into ten-minute intervals of work, driving and chores. Who has a period in the afternoon that isn’t already accounted for? When does this governor find time to seduce?”

  “I suspect politicians don’t seduce,” Lillian said. “Presumably it’s all arranged by the staff.”

  “Still.” Margo said this in the way the word “still” can be converted via inflection into a sentence. “If someone arranged to have Will Smith waiting for me in a hotel room, my first words would be, ‘This needs to be quick.’”

  “Cable showed the governor giving the mandatory tearful speech, stalwart wife by his side. Let’s hope she has a percentage of the book rights,” Lillian said.

  “Maybe she set her own husband up with an intern so she could get a divorce and a movie sale all in the same package. That would prove this really is the twenty-first century.”

  They laughed. Margo said, “Before Tom gets home—you seem all right, are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I mean, hasn’t it been five years?”

  “Five exactly,” Lillian said. “I’m touched you would remember the date.”

  Sheepish, Margo indicated her smart phone. “I put the date in here,” she explained. Then stopped and said, “Should I not have placed something so personal and private in an electronic device?” The smart phone was efficient but callous. Diaries and notebooks are inefficient, but seem warm to the touch.

  “I had a difficult time last night, knowing today would be five years,” Lillian said. “Then when I woke up I felt fine. Is it wrong for me to feel fine?”

  Margo felt nothing about her friend could ever be wrong. That Lillian was fine on the morning that marked the fifth anniversary of Madeline’s death seemed a sign her period of grief was ending, assuming one could ever stop grieving a child’s death.

  “I think it’s good that you feel fine, this is what Madeleine would want,” Margo said. Grief counselors often tell relatives or survivors that the dead would want them to be happy. This may be hollow sentiment, but it’s not exactly as if grief counselors have a huge toolkit at their disposal. “Do you want to talk about her?”

  “No,” Lillian replied. “What I want is to change the subject.”

  Since Margo had mentioned her cell phone, Lillian supposed she might know something about computers, and asked her how to back up hard drives. Lillian had been working for a decade on a history of village art in Carpathian Ruthenia. Her manuscript and all her notes were on disk—if a passing comet caused electricity to stop flowing, the entire project would vanish. She’d chosen Carpathian Ruthenia because she believed it the sole period no art historian had done. Lillian lived in terror of coming across a university-house publication catalog listing an upcoming title like Representationalism Among the Proto-Magyars: Volume One.

  Margo told her any one of her students—anyone under age twenty-five—could answer any question about electronics. Then Margo wondered aloud when Tom would be home, saying indistinctly that in his new job Tom did not control his hours.

  The two women spent some time arranging furniture to try to make the place seem larger. Tom and Margo had put a lot into storage, finding themselves having to pay for not being able to use something. Selling off furniture they couldn’t fit into the townhome did not make financial sense. If Craigslist and the classifieds were any guide, the Vermont cherry armoire Margo spent five thousand dollars on only a few years before—a superb piece—might fetch five hundred dollars now, and that was assuming a buyer could be found. They owned a mahogany dining-room set, a dozen chairs and a table suitable for King Arthur and his knights. Margo wanted big, for the dinner parties she loved to throw. The table did not fit in the townhome dining room, and she couldn’t let it go for a fraction of what it cost. So the table was in storage, along with six of the chairs. At least they still had a dining room. Some of the townhomes in their complex did not, only a breakfast nook. How could one live without a dining room?

  Margo thought about the dreary day she and Tom drove up to the place whose sign announced, SELF-STORAGE. She told Tom that only in America do businesses offer storage of the self, and chuckled at her own joke. Soon she realized the joke was not funny—everyone she glimpsed arriving at or departing from the self-storage facility appeared to be fairly far along into some phase of sadness or personal failure.

  Margo heard a car door outside and then the chirp-chirp of the alarm activating, the modern car being better protected than the modern person. Tom entered, carrying plastic-handle bags with the 7-Eleven logo. He was dressed in a sales-floor clerk’s vest of Restoration Hardware, and wore on his belt a circular clip containing many keys on a retractable lanyard.

  Margo looked at the ba
gs in a disapproving manner. “The grocery store is cheaper,” she said. Yet she should have gone out to pick up a few things—it had been inconsiderate of her to expect Tom to stop on his way home.

  “Sorry, I’m just tired,” Tom said. “At the grocery store you park like a mile from the door then the inside is so big, you wander. At the new Safeway they have an aisle for domestic water and another entire aisle for imported water. I’m too tired for such a big place after a day on my feet. Seven-Eleven is tempting: just pull up, grab it, get out. They practically push you out. You don’t think about paying too much.”

  “‘Too much’ is a matter of point of view,” Lillian said. “Convenience has a cost, like any other commodity or service. Everything comes with a price.”

  In the economics department at her college, statements such as that were not intended to be harsh, merely analytical: “Students, in this class we will discuss the scarcity concept that underlines neoclassical economics. In order for the market to allocate resources efficiently, everything must come with a price.…”

  Even in a utopia, the doctors would earn more than the cabdrivers and command more purchasing power. It is not hard to imagine a society both utopian yet having price-allocation via scarcity, plus significant inequality. Suppose the minimum annual income were $100,000—paid even to janitors and hotel maids—while the maximum annual income rose in steps, based on job value, to $500,000. There would be significant inequality in such a society, and also plenty of incentive to become a surgeon or inventor or pilot, to earn the maximum. The incentive would ensure productivity while rewarding talent, keeping society vibrant. Yet there would be no poverty nor any extreme wealth. Wouldn’t this be utopian? But all that is college talk. For most people, the knowledge that “everything comes with a price” is a lifelong curse.

  Tom put the bags on the counter—eggs, bread, American cheese slices, beer, a discount brand of ground coffee that cost more in 7-Eleven than premium whole bean in a grocery store. The bread was a new variety, whole-wheat white, which sounded a bit like low-fat bacon. The label proclaimed the bread to be Soft ’N’ Hearty and declared the product possessed Fresh Baked Taste. Not that the bread was fresh baked; rather, it had fresh-baked taste. Perhaps there was no meaningful difference between being fresh and tasting fresh. Products on grocers’ shelves now say things like MADE FROM REAL POTATOES. And “real potatoes” differ from “potatoes” … how, exactly?

  Tom felt self-conscious about shopping at 7-Eleven and paying the price of convenience. “Now I notice the people who frequent convenience stores,” he said. “They arrive in brand-new monster-sized pickup trucks with all the options; that can’t have been a smart decision. People who should not be blowing five bucks on a travel-sized laundry detergent, they should be buying the jumbo size in a regular store and getting thirty washes for the same price. But they’re too disorganized to shop properly, or to think more than a couple loads of laundry ahead. The kind of petty blunders they make at the 7-Eleven symbolize the other decisions that hold them back in life, like impulse marriages or runaway credit-card debt. And the store itself—the marketing, it’s designed to cause you to make petty blunders.”

  “I can see stopping at a 7-Eleven if you need to pick up milk or a candy bar,” Lillian said. “Otherwise one does not belong in such places.”

  “I feel I do now, somehow,” Tom said.

  Margo was talking on her cell to Caroline, who was at a birthday party; Megan was at a different birthday party, on the opposite end of the county. Often Margo talked to her girls for longer periods by phone than when they were in the same room.

  “I’m trying to pay for things like groceries with cash; it’s more disciplined than using a card,” Tom told Lillian. “There is too much credit-card debt!” He said this too strongly for a casual conversation. “Even these smooth-looking professional couples who come into the store, they want home Jacuzzis or a built-in gas fireplace on time. I take their credit statements. They have five cards maxed out and they’re looking for fresh credit. Usually they get it.”

  Margo had finished talking to Caroline and listened to the last few statements. “People make mistakes with money because it’s so easy to,” she supposed. “Imagine if you could have all the sex you wanted right now, delivered with a friendly smile, and you just had to sign a piece of paper acknowledging you were warned there would be complications later.”

  “I’d sign!” Lillian said brightly.

  “Credit cards are like that,” Margo said. “You can have the tennis bracelet or the Rolex right now, tonight, and being able to buy it feels like an achievement. Later when the bill arrives you think it’s somehow unfair you have to pay, because you’ve already lost interest in whatever you bought.” Margo had noticed the girls talked with keen anticipation about material things they wanted—types of phones, brands of clothes. Once the desired item was obtained, they lost interest and began speaking of the next thing wished for.

  “My theory,” Lillian said, “is that people buy what they can’t afford because subconsciously they believe they will die anyway before the debts add up.” Tom shot her a look, though neither woman noticed.

  Margo had enjoyed the years in which Tom’s rising income allowed her to purchase that which she didn’t need. But she was also aware that simply buying what strikes one’s fancy, without any long-term plan for lean times, is not wise for a family, let alone a nation.

  “If buying on debt gets you what you want, many people don’t think beyond that,” she said. “Walk into a showroom and sign some forms, they give you a bedroom set. The consequences are down the road.” To buy without seeming to pay by using credit, especially gimmick debts like nothing down or no payments till next year, was, Margo thought, like reverting to the habits of a child. You’d ask your parents for something and they would give it to you. There was no price to be paid later, no consequences, no sense that the parents faced money limits … the child’s challenge was simply to twist Mom’s and Dad’s arms until they provided what was wanted. The nation had grown childish, she thought—interest groups saw their challenge as twisting congressional arms until their special favor was provided, without discussing the debt cost or consequences. For children to think that way was human nature. For the leaders of a country to think that way was frightening.

  Lillian asked, “You turned the Lexus back in to the dealer, didn’t you?” She had noticed the car gone from the townhouse driveway.

  “The lease was up soon, and the Hyundai has a better warranty,” Margo replied, in the same voice she once used when declaring that she didn’t really want the lead in her high-school senior play. It was a dumb play. It was a dumb Lexus.

  Lillian said something about ordering out dinner. Tom didn’t want to hear that. They’d decided to eliminate restaurant food; it was spooky how easily a delivered Chinese dinner turned out to be sixty dollars. Before he could say anything, Lillian volunteered to go out to pick up food and some wine. Tom grimaced and reached for his wallet; Lillian waved her hand, saying she would treat. Tom felt embarrassed.

  “I’m going to fix this,” he told Margo after Lillian left. “I’ve got a plan and it works one way or the other. One way or the other.”

  Lately Tom had been making enigmatic references to having a plan. Margo found this discomforting, as he would not explain. She began to ask him again but Tom said, “I have to open tomorrow. I need to be there at five A.M. to let the stockers in. That means I have to be in the shower at four A.M. If I don’t disarm the security at precisely five A.M., proving I was there, I don’t get to work the next extra shift.”

  Margo protested, “Tomorrow is Sunday!”

  She knew if he needed to report to the store that early, inevitably Tom would wolf down dinner and be asleep at nine. And who wants to be driving to work in the dark on a Sunday morning?

  “It’s only a matter of time till the store goes twenty-four hours,” Tom said. “The new globalized economic model is that whenever any part of
the world is working, every part ought to be working.” First capitalism was going to make everyone equally impoverished. Then communism was going to make everyone equally miserable. Now global economics will make everyone equally sleep-deprived.

  “Try to be careful about giving hints about our situation in front of Lillian,” Margo said. “She doesn’t know how bad it is. I don’t want her to find out you have to get up before sunrise on Sunday to go to a hardware store.”

  “A furnishings store,” Tom said, enjoying being snide. “They coach us to avoid the word ‘hardware.’ We sell faucets, but they are not hardware. They are home solutions.” Margo laughed and kissed him and pressed her crotch against his. He did not press back.

  Margo needed some lovin’ and she also needed oxytocin, though she did not know that detail of biochemistry. The intense pleasure of orgasm lasts thirty seconds; oxytocin, released during sexual arousal, dwells in the body for about a week, causing a feeling of contentedness. Married people and long-term couples always get along better if they’ve had sex recently—because of the pleasure, sure, but also because a contentedness hormone is flowing. Long-term human relationships involve a lot of stress that the single person does not experience. One of the compensations is the warm, empathetic sensations that come in the aftermath of sex. If you have a regular partner, you experience the warm feeling regularly. Probably this had something to do with our distant ancestors forming the antecedents of family groups.

  Seeming exhausted, Tom began to speak. “Today a man comes in, sixty maybe. I know someday I’ll say sixty is the new forty. He’s got the lemon tart in tow, half his age. The kind who’s too thin, too much eye shadow, can hardly balance her heels are so high, looks hot from a distance but the closer she gets the less good she looks. She’s talking on the cell the entire time and also chewing gum, doesn’t even speak to me, just points at things. I show him the top-of-the-line SubZero refrigerator, forty-nine-inch doors, six thousand dollars. He says, ‘Don’t you have anything nicer?’ I show him the latest camelback sofas—four thousand for a freaking sofa—he says, ‘Don’t you have anything more impressive?’ Tells me he just got the kind of wine cooler that you have to reinforce the floor for. I show him countertops, tell him what country the various classes of granite come from. He wants to know specifically which quarry—only wants granite from a quarry that has been in continuous use since Roman days. The lemon tart read about that in an airline magazine. At least she can read.